When a company needs to train employees on new information and procedures, it can be a confusing and frustrating headache for all involved.

Saint John-based ProcedureFlow aims to make that task painless for all parties with a platform that will help make employees experts on new material more quickly and easily.

We asked CEO Daniella Degrace three questions about what ProcedureFlow can do:

1) What are the biggest problems businesses are running into when it comes to communicating internally?

The biggest problem our customers are facing is how to achieve a consistent level of expertise from their employees across the company regardless of their tenure, role or experience level.
Most companies find themselves with employees who are either newly onboarded with little to no experience; or employees who have have tenure and that have figured out how to be good at their job the hard way, through time … and a lot of it. These employees have earned their stripes the hard way and some can be resistant to change. The business challenge this presents is that each person has developed their own way of doing day to day activities and this can drive inconsistency. This can result in a customer talking to two people and receiving two different answers and experience.

2) How does ProcedureFlow help with those challenges?

Imagine having every employee perform like your best rock star employees.

The opportunity for our customers is to have all employees find the right information at the right place, at the right time. A company’s single source of truth is the holy grail of synchronized operational efficiency. Every company in the world has processes and procedures. But traditional tools like Word, Visio and knowledge articles produce documents that are hard to read, hard to find and are often outdated because only a small group is responsible for their upkeep. ProcedureFlow is drastically different.

ProcedureFlow is a SaaS software that provides employees with a visual map of complex operation procedures and information. It presents easy to follow step-by-step instructions structured into small, hyperlinked flowcharts. ProcedureFlow makes your employees experts faster by combining information with the knowledge and experience of your most senior resources, ensuring your employees have access to the information they need exactly when they need it. It is highly accessible and our patent pending Social Collaboration feature engages employees to easily contribute in making the processes the best they can be.

A customer support team, as an example, uses the collective knowledge of their best people (or Subject Mater Experts) and brings it together to tell the one truth that everyone can present back to the customer. This improves quality, first call resolution, the confidence of the employees (they know they are delivering the right answers) and improves the overall customer experience. The best way to engage these senior employees is to get them involved and engaged. Every single one of them wants to provide great service to their customers. Leverage their collective years of experience to build the process flows and then give them permission to continue to offer suggestions to make the experience better. Having senior leaders in the business communicating why they are implementing PF and what it will do for the business and their customers is another important tactic in getting buy in. It’s easier for new employees. They accept it as training. The benefit is that training and onboarding becomes a good experience and they feel confident on day one.

3) ProcedureFlow is being spun out of some work done at Innovatia. How is that different than launching a startup without a corporate parent?

It’s a lot like the parent/child relationship. You have the proud parents who invest time so their child grows up with the wisdom necessary to face the world and find success, and then you have the energetic adolescent eager to fly from the nest towards independence. Without the knowledge and experience learned from the parents, the adolescent would likely stumble a lot more than necessary. And the adolescent, because of its natural curiosity, will push boundaries and fulfill dreams that the parents could have not yet imagined. A bit poetic maybe, but it’s actually quite similar to our ProcedureFlow journey with our Innovatia corporate parent

When ProcedureFlow spun out of Innovatia, we already had an incredible product baseline to work with, a few amazing customers, a proven customer Return On Investment story, and a rockstar team that was eager to bring ProcedureFlow to market. The experience, expertise and credibility that Innovatia has in their market enabled us to incubate our product baseline with an A list of world class customer brands who had real business pains and needs and where looking for a solution, which ProcedureFlow, as a result, was built to meet and exceed.

There is no doubt in my mind that our corporate parent accelerated our entry and credibility into market. As far as letting the adolescent ProcedureFlow fly out of the nest, Innovatia has been simply amazing, a great example I think of how to do it well. But once in a while it’s nice to know our corporate parents are still there when we call on them for some of that good old fashioned wisdom and advice.

We are incredibly excited about the momentum we have built in such a short time More importantly, we are proud of how ProcedureFlow is directly contributing to our customers’ success in such a prominent way.